Making Sense of a World Where Frank Gehry Designs Jewelry

Meanwhile, Scott Klinker over at Core77has gotten into that same kind of discussion as the post above, but far more in depth, coming to the conclusion that design is fantastic because it can evolve into whatever it wants, taking over whole industries whenever it pleases. That’s what you get when you have a blanket term like “design” that can really mean whatever you want it to mean, from architecture to images to advertising to, heck, strip it all down and make it mean “creation” (hence why the religious zealots like it so much). And thus, that sheer breadth of definition helps to explain things like something we’d noticed recently and that Klinker cites as an example: Frank Gehrysigning up to make stuff for Tiffany’s. It’s a great read and something of a nice testament to the power of a word. Here’s a bit:

If the world is flat as Tom Friedman claimed, then so is design–stripped of the hierarchies that used to distinguish high and low, design and art, theoretical and applied. Has this newfound freedom produced wild experimental design thinking? Not enough. Instead, design’s intellectual edge has been mostly employed by the vanities of a fashion system. Someday we may recall this period as design’s fashion phase.